A little while back, we posted an article on ways to stay anonymous online. I recommended that you try InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer and Incognito Mode in Google Chrome, for example. Another useful tip was to use disposable email addresses, because it meant that the forum, website, or online business wouldn’t get your...

The advent of smartphones and social media has made communication between individuals exponentially faster and easier. Whether immersed in a chaotic project or bored to death on a bus, friends and colleagues can communicate quickly and easily whenever they have a few moments and a keypad. Long phone calls spent “catching up”...

Microsoft PowerPoint was initially released over two decades ago and has since revolutionized the way presentations are given. It’s popularity is due in no small part to the professional-looking results one can achieve with minimal effort and little expertise with the software. In fact, if you’re afraid that you can’t...

Writing is like speaking — everyone thinks they can do it, then does it without thinking, and then wishes they hadn’t. Modern technology means we all work with more words in a year than an ancient scholar would have seen in his entire life, even if he hadn’t died of cholera at age forty (some days that seems like the easier...

They say the medium is the message, and with PowerPoint that medium is needed to reach the people who’ve died of boredom. The same simple mistakes have turned a handy tool for arranging information into weaponized monotony. PowerPoint now enjoys the same reputation as a pit of scorpions, which is a pity, because it’s (mis)used all...

Surviving smartly in the modern world means most of us have multiple email addresses. Work, real life, and a spare spam-catcher (or three) for those silly sites which honestly believe watching a video clip is worth your name and address — they allow us to filter and organize our incoming traffic, and that’s more essential...

The conference room is an instant oil-check for any company: if it’s where things get done, well done…but if it’s a pit of endless PowerPoint despair, there may be room for improvement. By shooting anyone who goes over time, for instance. Unfortunately, we can’t advise such violent courses of action (unless we...

The most important part of getting everything done is remembering what “everything” actually is. We haven’t re-branded as the Dumb Obviousness Blog; proper project management is often overlooked, especially when you’re not actually a project manager but only organizing your own things, and double-especially because...

Over the course of the day, you do a lot of communicating — from making phone calls to sending emails, it may seem like all you ever do is communicate. And, for some of you, that’s absolutely the case. However, there are ways to streamline how you communicate by outsourcing different aspects — such as managing contacts,...

Living a smartlife doesn’t just mean making things easier for yourself — it means learning how to deal with all the cavemen who refuse to join the future. Or as you might have to call them: “co-workers.” Even when you understand that technology is in an incredibly labor-saving array of options, you’ll be...